In
bioinformatics
Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...
, miRBase is a
biological database
Biological databases are libraries of biological sciences, collected from scientific experiments, published literature, high-throughput experiment technology, and computational analysis. They contain information from research areas including genom ...
that acts as an archive of
microRNA sequences and annotations.
As of September 2010 it contained information about 15,172 microRNAs.
This number has risen to 38,589 by March 2018. The miRBase registry provides a centralised system for assigning new names to microRNA genes.
miRBase grew from the microRNA registry resource set up by Sam Griffiths-Jones in 2003.
According to Ana Kozomara and Sam Griffiths-Jones miRBase has five aims:
# To provide a consistent naming system for microRNAs
# To provide a central place collecting all known microRNA sequences
# To provide human and computer readable information for each microRNA
# To provide primary evidence for each microRNA
# To aggregate and link to microRNA target information
MiRBase contains miRNAs belonging of various species belonging to
Alveolata,
Chromalveolata,
Metazoa
Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, are able to move, can reproduce sexually, and go through an ontogenetic stage in ...
,
Mycetozoa,
Viridiplantae and
Virus
A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea.
Since Dmitri Ivanovsky's 1 ...
es. For the
Viridiplantae, in release 21 (2014) data is available for 73
species
In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate s ...
. This includes 4800 unique mature
miRNAs and 8480 precursor sequences.
The current version of MiRBase is release 22 (March 2018).
References
External links
miRBase
MicroRNA
Biological databases
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